Out of the shadows
An award-winning comedian shocked his audience by talking about his father’s suicide. Rachel Thomas reports.
Cori Gonzalez-Macuer still gets night terrors over the scream his sister let out when he broke the news that their father was dead.
Gonzalez-Macuer, better known as a Billy T-Award-winning comedian, opened up about his father’s suicide in 2012 during a recent TEDx talk in Auckland.
Four years on, he still wrestles with the day he found his father’s body.
‘‘This is my dad, y’know. He’s like, my hero.’’
In that moment, he contemplated taking his own life, to avoid the pain of losing his father.
‘‘Like most things people go through in life [that] you kinda want to ignore . . . you want to ignore your bills when they come in the mail,’’ he said in a separate interview.
‘‘It was like, I don’t want to have to deal with this.’’
With one per cent battery on his phone, he called the ambulance, his mother and his little sister in Australia to break the news.
‘‘It took probably two years before I was comfortable talking about it with anyone. I’d get drunk and start talking to people about it.
‘‘Even my closest friends don’t really know what happened.’’
Doing the TEDx talk was difficult – he stressed about it for two months beforehand, but it’s something he felt he needed to share.
‘‘There’s something in my life that I’ve experienced that people could learn from, or could help people out.
‘‘No one knows what the topic is, and I know people in the audience were expecting a comedy set.’’
His father died during the last stage of filming on Taika Waititi’s What We Do in
the Shadows, in which Gonzalez-Macuer played a vampire.
He said working helped, and five days after his father’s death he performed a gig in Palmerston North.
‘‘I never really had a chance to sit down and get really depressed about it. That kind of spread out over a few years.’’
Gonzalez-Macuer’s father never talked about his own battles, but he stopped his son from taking his own life once before.
There’s a culture in Chile, where the family is originally from, that expects men to be staunch and silent, Gonzalez-Macuer said.
He understood how hard those vulnerable conversations could be, but said talking about it, with any trusted person, was so important.
‘‘When I’ve been down it’s been hard to tell people and I’d rather pretend it’s not there.
‘‘But don’t be embarrassed about it, there’s nothing be ashamed of.’’
It took probably two years before I was comfortable talking about it with anyone. I’d get drunk and start talking to people about it. Cori Gonzalez-Macuer